the_dengle said:
The whole point of hiring an external company to localize the game is to defer the task of translating the game to someone else. If Nintendo was going through all of the dialogue telling them what to change, they might as well have just translated it themselves. Sure, maybe Nintendo told them to change the outfits (or told Silicon Studio? Or did it themselves? Who would be able to alter the actual assets within the game?), maybe they told them to up the ages. Maybe it was Square-Enix themselves who did those things, or maybe Binari Sonori made the call on the ages themselves. There is a lot of inappropriate dialogue in Bravely Default that was toned down in the Western versions, and I doubt Nintendo was hands-on with all of it. At some point, Binari Sonori was left to their own devices. There's no clear-cut explanation anywhere of which company ordered the changed costumes or the raised ages. With regard to the ages, first of all the character models in Bravely Default are chibi, so it's easy to smudge their ages whichever way you like. This is not the case in X. Second, there is a veeerrryyy uncomfortable sidequest in Bravely Default involving an actual pedophile/rapist and the youngest party member, 15 in the Japanese version. The subtext in this quest was toned down in the Western versions, but certainly not removed. My guess would be that this subplot is the reason the ages were upped, that rather than censor the villain's intent they simply chose to make the party member a bit older. If that is the case, then unless X has a similar subplot involving Lynlee I don't see why they would feel the need to lie about her age. Bravely Default and Fire Emblem: Awakening are the only Nintendo-published games that were 'touched-up' during the localization process in recent memory, and they are far from the only ones with sex appeal or underaged characters or some combination of the two. They aren't in the habit of altering in-game assets from the Japanese version to just avoid controversy.
People were pretty mad about this once, and then they got over it. |
No outsourced studios is going to have the authority to make game content decisions. They just do the task they're contracted to do. Nintendo's name is the putting the title outside of Japan, so any decision made was done with their approval. Really, there are hardly any games that Nintendo publishes that require (and really, none of these games required any sort of altering) their response. It's mostly an Nintendo of America thing, as most NoE go through just fine. I know that they were asked to release Senran Kagura digital only. Nintendo just runs things differently.
